


between towers

by tigrrmilk



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Oxford, magical fireworks, this is an AU but there is still magic in it i promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-01-27 01:34:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12570740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: Through the doorway at the end of the entrance hall, he could see a wide portion of the small quad ahead. Green and lush. It was early October, and the sun was shining, thank the lord. Or at least thankMerlin. It was Michaelmas. And Remus was taking up a place at Oxford to read English.





	between towers

**Author's Note:**

> please forgive me for this extremely self-indulgent tale. and also please forgive me any liberties taken with the time that this should be set. who knows if oxford english students took mods in 1979? not me.  
> 

 

 

 

 

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours   
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded   
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded   
Rural, rural keeping — folk, flocks, and flowers.   
\--

 

from 'Duns Scotus's Oxford', Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remus pushed his glasses up his nose and stared at the little piece of paper again. First year English students were to meet with their tutors (and presumably each other) in Room 2, Staircase VI, at 9am on Thursday of 0th week. He clutched his suitcase tighter. Right.

He paused for a second, and then turned. Through the doorway at the end of the entrance hall, he could see a wide portion of the small quad ahead. Green and lush. It was early October, and the sun was shining, thank the lord. Or at least thank _Merlin_. It was Michaelmas. And Remus was taking up a place at Oxford to read English.

He still couldn’t understand all of the twists of fate that had led him to this moment. But this wasn’t the time to puzzle over that. In the quad, he had been told, would be college staff members waiting for him, and older students to show him to his room, with clipboards and keys and maps, and --

Well, the loud fast rush of college life.

Somewhere in the distance, he heard bells ringing.

\---

 ****The first two terms went by in a rush of introductory lectures, seminars, and most of all tutorials. Remus had never written essays for tutors before. For _teachers_ before. To begin with he found it frightening how behind everyone else he was, but he soon realised that maybe nobody was as well-prepared for the experience as all that. One of his tutorial partners had gone to Harrow (or was it Winchester?) and he didn’t know how to use commas or write a conclusion or _anything_.

Other people had been homeschooled. Other people had... been brought up abroad, or in international schools, or in different schools every year. A lot of them had gone to selective minor public schools, or the big public schools. Grammar schools. A few had gone to comprehensives, a few had gone to Catholic schools.

There were those who had finished school long ago, and who often had other things to do, and only sometimes came to hall, or to bops, or to anything social. There were those who had gone to sixth-form colleges, other colleges, universities abroad, and at least one who had started out doing a foundation course at the University that had then allowed them to skip to year two, and the main part of the degree (“but I still don’t know anyone, so I’m stuck drinking with you lot.”)

In short; there were so many routes that had brought people here. And yes, the public schools were overrepresented, and yes, Remus often struggled to find much to say when faced with two boys who had gone to Eton and a girl from Wycombe Abbey. But... well.

What did it say about Remus that in this University, amongst students of so many different backgrounds -- he’d still not found anyone he quite felt at home with? He had a lot of acquaintances and probably even some casual friends, but? When was it going to _begin_?

He found himself writing the feeling down in letters home, and then crossing it out furiously. How maudlin. When he finally sealed the envelopes up and furtively gave them to his parents’ owl, no his _father’s_ owl, who could just about make it into his student room if he held the sticky window as far as it would open, the letters were short and cheery.

His dad worried about everything else. Don’t make him worry about _this_ , too.

It’s not like he needed to write letters. He went home every full-moon. Which was a problem in that you weren’t really meant to leave Oxford during term, but term was only eight weeks long and he could usually pass it off as a long weekend -- or a minor fifth-week breakdown, which seemed worryingly well understood and expected. “I’m okay now,” he’d say. “I just couldn’t make it out of bed for a few days.”

The best thing about recovering from the full moon was that Remus wouldn’t even mind that college food was kind of bland and salty. He’d eat everything he could fit onto his plate and more. One day he found that they were serving some left-over venison from a formal meal earlier that evening for college faculty, and he found himself almost inhaling it alongside a mess of cold mashed potato. A girl sitting opposite him -- was she reading Theology, maybe? They’d never exchanged more than a few words -- looked kind of grossed out by the whole thing, but Remus thought it was great. He went back for a second dinner -- this time sausages and more potato and a yorkshire pudding.

He knew the food here wasn’t great, objectively. Frozen food, too salty, not enough vegetables. But there was a lot of it. Remus had spent enough of his time in strange sanitariums and on special cleanses and dietary regimes that his parents thought would help that he knew how to appreciate the simple fact of _enough_ food. Food that was just _there_.

Unexpectedly, Remus found that he enjoyed a lot of the reading. The reading lists were hilariously overstuffed and there were too many essays to write and there was just generally far too much to do -- but if he could shut that out for a while. If he could manage that, then yeah. Yeah, it was good. He liked Hopkins and Tennyson, didn’t have much time for Hardy. Anything ecstatic, anything he couldn’t easily explain away. If it melted into air as he wrote his essays, what was the point? Poetry was what stuck, and he found himself reading old books of it in the cold passageways of the library. The library was a converted church, and to get back to college he had to walk through the graveyard.

It all made sense, even if it didn’t make sense at all. Hopkins and Tennyson did, anyway.

It was the closest he came to magic, some weeks. It was funny, because Oxford seemed like it should be teeming with magic, everywhere. Stone and lots of dead bodies and strange old buildings and furtive passageways and locked-up old libraries and museums inside museums and robes and gowns and songs about dead geese and rituals about wild boars and domes and stained glass and for some reason -- he hadn’t found any.

Not for the first time, Remus wondered if maybe this was it -- maybe that world was just shut to him forever. He’d never made it to Hogwarts, had dutifully taken his NEWTs and OWLs as an outside student... but he’d never belonged to that world. Not really. Didn’t know any wizards except his dad. Maybe it was all made up; maybe it was all just a strange hallucination, and as he got older it would -- disapparate. No, that was the wrong metaphor. Drift away like smoke.

But on the last Thursday of Hilary, it all changed.

\---

“My uncle was at Christ Church,” Edward was saying. “Well, great-uncle. He said that in his day, nobody made any real friends in their first year. Later on, you know.”

“Hmm,” Remus said, trying to sweep the room with his gaze to see who else was at the party without being obvious about it.

Edward laughed briefly. “Of course, he wasn’t quite a contemporary of Waugh...”

Remus downed the rest of his wine -- half a glass, he winced as it went down -- and then jerked his head towards the drinks table. “Going to get another,” he said. He almost offered to get one for Edward, but he stopped himself.

Remus half-turned, new glass of red in hand -- maybe it wasn’t as harsh as the white, he hoped, slightly fuzzily -- and saw that Edward was a few steps behind. To his left, one half of the door to the quad was ajar. It was a cold, crisp March night outside, and Remus hoped it had stopped raining and that Edward wouldn’t follow him. He fled, wine in hand.

Remus ducked into the passageway between the college bar and toilets and emerged into the graveyard. A few finalists were smoking and arguing with each other and the college dean about Logic, but otherwise there was nobody much around. It was Wednesday of 8th, and there were last lectures in the morning, and last tutorials, and -- Remus was supposed to be finishing a commentary on _The Dream of the Rood_ , which he didn’t even _dislike_ . But he had wanted to go to the last Poetry Society social of term, and he had been promised free wine, and -- _I should be trying harder to make friends_ , Remus thought. It wasn’t even that Edward was unpleasant. He just --

Remus was thinking about this very hard and staring at the night sky when he heard a loud crack, and then another one. Louder than that. Like something had been hurled out of the sky. He half-expected the heavens to open and drown him, and for more rolling thunder to follow -- but they didn’t. Instead, a crowd of fireworks filled the sky. But not fireworks like Remus had ever seen before -- dragons unfurling and chasing each other across the dark, flowers growing out of glowing seeds, a rain of stars and stars and rain and a black night behind them like nothing he’d seen in -- Oxford, since before he left his parents in Scotland weeks before.

The finalists were swearing as they struck matches to light more cigarettes. “Um, where are those fireworks coming from?” Remus asked. They looked at him blankly. They looked up at the sky, which to Remus was still ablaze with -- what looked like another world. Their eyes slid back down, and they shrugged at each other.

“Don’t drink the college wine,” one of them advised him. “Or rather, don’t drink any more of it.”

Only the college dean seemed to half-understand. He smiled. “The end of term does funny things to us all.” A pause. “Especially if you’re _New_.”

Was Remus imagining the emphasis? Either way, the next college north of here was New College. Which, of course, was very old and big. And were the fireworks coming from anywhere real? If they were, it would surely be _north_ \- the direction that Remus had been looking when the sky first broke.

“Thanks for the advice,” Remus said. His voice was thick. Not for the first time that night, he fled. Glass firmly in hand.

\---

 ****The back entrance to New, normally closed at this time (or at least Remus thought), was open, so he skipped through. He could see the fireworks just as well from his graveyard as here -- but, he thought. But. They must be magic. Maybe I’m not so alone, he thought.

He walked deeper into the college, eyes firmly trained on the sky, as different apparitions were sent up. Now there was a forest, now there was a bear. A few very literal constellations brought out of the stars. And he kept walking, not really looking where he was going, as if his feet could guide him. Until he almost bumped into -- some students he didn’t recognise.

“Sorry,” he said, automatically. He bounced back. Luckily his glass was mostly empty.

He took in the other students in a split-second. All boys. Well. Young men. Long robes -- they almost looked like scholars’ gowns, but they weren’t scholars’ gowns. The fabric was too rich, and they were worn too casually. Robes, not scuzzy nylon things thrown over suits.

But it was dark. Was he just seeing what he wanted to see?

“Who let the fucking muggle in,” one of the boys said, sweeping his gaze over the students behind him. “Come on, Pettigrew. The wards are your job.”

“I thought,” A smaller student said, pulling a wand out of his pocket and starting to to twist it in concentration. “I thought they were up!”

“There must have been a gap. Honestly, do I have to do everything myself.”

The taller student reached into his own robes for his wand. Remus hadn’t known what to say for a minute, but he backed away as he realised that he was quite possibly about to be obliviated back into last term. “Er,” he said. “I’m not a muggle.”

Silence. Remus wasn’t sure what he expected. Maybe he should have been clearer.

“Really,” he said, and pulled his own wand out from where it was stashed - in the long pocket of his slightly-frayed jeans.

The student’s face didn’t change. “Ah,” he said.

 ****\---

 ****“N-no,” Remus said. “I’m reading English at,” and he raised his arm to gesture in the direction of his college. The other students were almost circling him now. The air felt very cold and Remus had never felt so aware of his -- ordinariness. He never felt normal. But here, he felt -- he felt like maybe he was a muggle. In a lumpy home-knitted jumper and scuffed trainers.

“Muggle Studies,” one of the students said to another, with a slight smirk.

“Father says that they’ve almost persuaded Dumbledore to drop the course entirely.”

“What’ll they do with the squib,” another of them said, and spat on the ground.

Remus tightened his grip on the wand. The fireworks had rapidly begun to dissolve in the sky; soon there would be no sign of the beautiful magic that had drawn him here.

 _Stupid, stupid_ , he thought. He wondered what Edward was doing now. Probably finishing off the wine and trying to lend out his books to other people at the party. Remus still had a battered collection of 1930s poetry that Edward had handed him at the start of term and he felt guilty about it for a second. It was about to be the vac and he hadn’t given it back.

It’s not Edward’s fault that he’s boring, Remus thought. Whereas...

“Talking of which,” the leader said, and he crossed his arms, as if he’d decided something. “You weren’t at school with us.”

“Bet _he’s_ a squib.”

“Ask him if he’s French. Maybe he’s French.”

Remus shook his head. A whole colony of frogs seemed to be filling his throat. “I was ill,” he said, finally.

“Bet he doesn’t even know what it’s for,” the leader said, more scornful this time. It felt like all of the boys were pressing in. It felt like suddenly the sky was very small. He reached for Remus’s wand --

BANG. It all happened very fast. The sky was wine-white, and then a pearly, summer blue. It was night but the world forgot that for a few moments. For a second Remus thought, no, they’re dead, what did I do. And then he realised that they were just sleeping, snoring, sprawled monstrously out on their backs. A crack of blood on the leader’s cheek.

“What,” he said, his wand hot in his left hand. He didn’t -- he didn’t remember doing anything. But as every young wizard knows -- sometimes you don’t mean to do anything and it happens anyway. If you leave it too late to act? Your magic, your body, your secret self acts for you. And you might not like what comes of it.

If only he had demonstrated sooner just _what_ he could do when he put his mind to it. Fat catherine wheels in the air and a glowing ball of harmless flame. His favourite. He’d never had a friend to show off those charms to.

These men weren’t friends, and weren’t going to be. He knew that --

“Come on, you loon,” a voice said, and Remus felt a hand tugging at his sleeve. “They’ll wake up in a second.”

“ _Peter_ ,” a second voice said, in disgust.

Remus couldn’t see anyone there. He closed his eyes briefly and he felt a cloak pass over his head and more bodies press in. His bones felt old and tired, like the moon was exerting its pressure. He let himself be pulled away. Because -- there was a mess of bodies tangled under an invisible cloak, and fear in the back of Remus’s throat. He didn’t fight because he didn’t --

“Who are you?” he said.

“Merlin, wait a second. We’re friendly if you are.”

Remus supposed there was nothing to do but to have faith and hope.

 ****\---

 ****They didn’t look like wizards.

The boys in New College had looked like wizards, in their long robes. But the boys sitting opposite him now, the boys who had dragged him away? They were wearing muggle clothes, and they looked about as scruffy as Remus felt.

They looked a bit like the same person drawn by different artists. Remus felt a slight pang when they took the cloak off and said “It’s ok, we just wanted to get you out of there,” and he realised it was two boys, two best friends, and that they seemed to mean well and that they were not like the others. And -- they had already somehow found one another.

Long hair that fell into their eyes. One of them had a too-big leather jacket; the other one was wearing what looked like an ancient college scarf and a home-knitted Holyhead Harpies jumper.

The boy with longer hair pushed a pint-glass into Remus’s hands. “Drink up,” he advised. “I’m going to.”

“Who are you?” Remus said. “Are you...?”

“James,” the Harpies fan said, and leaned over to shake his hand. “Yeah, we’re wizards too. This is Sirius.”

He said the word _wizards_ slightly apologetically.

“Is it safe here?” Remus said, dumbly. They were nearby. And even though under the cloak it had felt like so many bodies crowded together, here, now, it was just the three of them.

James winced. “We want to stay nearby in case anything happens and we need to go back.”

“Potter insisted on alerting the Proctors,” Sirius said. “Who won’t care, and will just patch them up quicker.” He shrugged.

Remus guessed that Potter was probably James. So, this was where he found himself - at a table outside the Turf, and the fireworks had not started up again, and neither had the rain.

Sirius smiled but didn’t lean forward. “It’ll warm you up.”

Remus took a sip of the beer and nearly choked. This was neither normal beer nor butterbeer Was there --

“Sirius,” James said, disgusted. “I am not going to tell you again: spiking it with firewhiskey does _not_ improve beer. Stop fucking it up.”

\---

 ****They told Remus strange, probably-embellished versions of their life histories over more beer, at The Turf and then a tiny pub between the two entrances to Blackwells, and they ended the night holed up in a strange common room deep in the bowels of a stone building that he’d never seen before (Remus thought they might have gone in through a back entrance to either Balliol or Trinity, but he wasn’t sure).

After going over their lives (short as they were so far), they discussed the finer points of flashy decoration charms, the science of potion-making, David Bowie, Rossetti’s Goblin Market (“Cousin of yours, wasn’t she?” James asked, and Sirius had only rolled his eyes in response), graffiti in the Bodleian loos and whether or not a particular mark they’d all noticed above one urinal was a recognisable sigil, and they compared the marks they got on their NEWTs and OWLs.

Sirius looked through the cabinets for alcohol. Remus rather felt like he’d had enough. James seemed to agree, as he tapped his wand against some empty (rather dusty) mugs and gave Remus a cup of steaming tea. Milky.

“Give it up,” James said, and with another quick flick of his wand he sent a cup soaring through the air towards Sirius’s head. Sirius caught it deftly, despite the previous drinking, and then yelped.

“It’s too fucking hot,” he said.

James sent a small cloud of ice cubes his way next. Sirius grabbed one out of the air and put it in his tea, then slumped onto the sofa next to Remus.

His cheeks were flushed slightly red. He was otherwise pale, except for a small number of freckles across the bridge of his nose.

James had small circular glasses, and didn’t look a million miles away from John Lennon.

 _Help_ , Remus thought.

James, of course, was practically engaged to his girlfriend from Hogwarts, who had a deferred place at Somerville and was currently playing as beater for the Harpies.

Sirius was estranged from his family and was half-considering dropping out at the end of the year. He’d inherited a flat from his weird uncle in London and claimed to resent living in college accommodation. Remus didn’t understand why he didn’t just live there -- if he was 18 and a talented wizard, presumably he could just apparate home every evening.

Whatever. Remus felt like he hadn’t volunteered much information about himself -- every time he tried to he just ended up asking them questions, or thanking them for saving him earlier that evening. “Who were they?” he asked.

“The Phoenix Club,” James said. Sirius just sneered at the name. “They like to pretend it’s 1199, which manifests itself as eating and drinking and maintaining a _highly exclusive environment_.”

“They’re violent fascists,” Sirius said. “Why else would they still maintain an all-male dining society? They’re not even fucking each other as far as I can tell.”

Remus flinched slightly. Sirius didn’t seem to notice. “One of our friends seems to have joined up.”

“Ex-friends,” James said, his mouth set in a grim line that didn’t seem very natural for him.

“Right,” Sirius said, and downed the last of his tea. As Remus watched, his cup filled up again to the top.

“Merlin,” James said, looking at his watch again. “I’ve got to meet Lily for breakfast tomorrow.”

Sirius smirked. “Fine, you go to bed.”

“I should probably go too,” Remus said, even though there was no real reason too. Except. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle being alone with Sirius. He was tired and a bit drunk and. Maybe this wasn’t even real, none of it. Maybe he had been stunned on New College. Maybe this was just a vivid dream.

“Guess I’ll see you out,” Sirius said.

“You’re such a gentleman,” James said. His tone was slightly undercut by the fact that he was tidying up the common room before leaving.

 ****\----

Remus couldn’t follow the route out of the college any more than he’d been able to follow the way in. Sirius saw him back to Broad Street, and then he -- shook his hand. “It was nice to meet you,” he said. He started to walk back, but then he turned to face Remus again. “You never told us your name,” he said.

“Remus,” Remus said, startled. “Lupin.”

And then -- Sirius vanished back into the night.

 ****\---

 ****Remus woke up the next morning with a pounding headache and when he considered the events of the night before over breakfast -- he realised that he had absolutely no idea how to find his new friends again. The disorientation he’d felt when going to their common room made him suspect that it was not a regular, or mundane _muggle_ space.

But it was nearly the full moon, and he had a room full of term detritus to pack up and take home, half a country away. What if they hadn’t really been real? He saw no sign of the Phoenix Club, either. He’d been half-expecting the leader to turn up at his college and demand a duel.

After all. They hadn’t been violent, had they? All they’d said was words -- and not magic ones. Just regular, boring words. Why had he felt so threatened? So. He’d thrown the first punch.

Remus was not comforted to think of this. What if they came looking for him?

When he left for the vacation, he was glad to go.

 ****\---

 ****As always, two days into the vac he found that he missed Oxford fiercely. He had been slack at taking the right books out from the library before he left, so he was trying to revise for mods from his notes and the odd selection of books he owned -- mostly made up of books that his mum had owned as a teenager. Her name was inked in the front of them, sometimes on an Ex-Libris slip she had pasted to the inside front cover.

She’d died when he was in the middle of applying for university. Remus can’t really remember much of that whole time now. He loves her old books, but they’re too much -- too full of her -- to be much use for revising from.

His father worked late at the ministry, and at the weekends he worked on the garden and brought Remus cups of tea. He always put half a teaspoon of sugar in, although Remus prefered it without.

When he was at home, there was nobody to write letters to. You can’t just say ‘Sirius’ to your owl and hope it knows what you means. There was a sinking feeling in his stomach when he thought of that night. No, no. No letters.

Remus had flirted with the idea of keeping a diary when he was younger, but he never kept it up. What if somebody came across it? _You coward_ , he thought. But he still couldn’t pick up a quill, or a pencil.

Their house was full of small, ordinary, domestic magic. The draining board that sluiced off all of the suds and water. The self-filling kettle. The photographs pinned to Remus’s wall -- his mother waved out of at least half a dozen.

The best photo was the one of Remus’s parents, a year or so before he was born. They’re young, and they’re somewhere windy. They hold onto each other, and they laugh. And they wave out at him.

Remus wasn’t allowed to take these photos to Oxford. What if the muggles saw them? So instead he had a few dull, lifeless copies that he took with him. Tucked into the bottom of his suitcase.

When he was packing for Trinity term, he considered smuggling the magical photos with him. His parents were waving at him, or mum was playing with dad’s hair, or they were dodging rain and telling jokes that he couldn’t hear. He was too late for any of that.

But no. He couldn’t take them with him. That’s not how any of this goes.

 ****\---

Trinity was hot, and itchy, and somehow even faster than Hilary or Michaelmas had been. Remus barely felt like he had time to breathe. Essays, and revision for exams, and trying desperately to cram in as much as he could before the long summer vac, which seemed to be gaping in front of him like a void --

He stayed up late poring over Old English poetry. It was closer to magic than anything else he’d studied. Some of it actually was magic -- he was sure that if he sung the Nine Herbs Charm while preparing and anointing the salve to someone, it would work as intended.

Well. But Remus never had been very good at potions. He’d only just scraped that O. But what chance did he have?

What chance do any of us have, Remus murmured to himself, as he crossed out his annotations and then wordlessly cursed them away and then started to write them out again. His handwriting was small, and cramped. It had to be. There was so much to fit in.

 ****\---

Midway through his exams, Remus woke up.

His pink carnation was wilting, and he was doing his best to revive it with a mug of cold water and a dash of magic in the hall. The hall was so big, and ugly, and new. And nobody was watching him.

Remus mumbled the words he remembered and then hissed to warn the spell off from being too much, too effective. He just didn’t want the thing to be dead. He had two more exams, and he couldn’t swap _this_ carnation for the next one before the last day.

He didn’t want to sprout a fucking carnation bush (do carnations grow on bushes? Remus thought) in the middle of lunch.

The spell worked -- and that’s what did it. He walked out into the quad, mug in hand. It was like the sky was -- blooming. Ink bleeding through paper. He suddenly realised that all term, so much magic had been there. Pulsing. Oxford was alive with it. The pollen in the air; all the stone suddenly looked warm; and there was magic.

Which didn’t mean he was suddenly surrounded by other wizards. But he felt it in the slight give of the wooden tables in the college bar. It had been there on May Day morning -- when he’d stood outside Magdalen College, waiting for dawn and an unseen choir to sing madrigals. How had he not seen it? Coffee in hand, willing the clouds to stay away, and -- praying to merlin that none of the people jumping into the Cherwell were going to break both their legs.

It had been there, helping him. He hadn’t been so tired. He hadn’t felt so slow and thick. He had, more than once, briefly closed his eyes in front of an overstuffed, too tall bookcase in the bodleian only to open his eyes and find that the library had rearranged itself around him. Here was the book he needed.

Then there was the system of tubes that he used to request titles from the stacks. Not magic -- resolutely not so. But it was something. Little pieces of paper, whizzing through pipes. Information, whisked through the air.

All of which was to say; the carnation wasn’t only magic because he’d revived it. He could choose to hate the tradition, as he’d had half a mind to when getting dressed that morning. But he could choose to take power from it, too. This strange system of flower signs; white for beginning, pink for the middle, and red for the end.

What is magic if not ritual? He looked up at the sky and tapped his foot against the ground.

He bought the carnations for his college parents with Edward, who was his college brother. A big paper tube of white and pink carnation each, and the red carnation sent a week later, on its on. Finals. Schools. He didn’t say good luck. He just -- left the flowers in their pigeon hole.

Oxford was painful and strange. But if Remus could work with it -- if at times, he could see how it worked, and how it could work for him -- it could be something more. It wasn’t just about tradition. It was about more than that. It was about people -- people with carnations. People giving flowers for exams. It was about being presented with a reading list far too big to get through -- and getting to decide the best way through it yourself.

It as about re-reading Hopkins while walking to his mods exam on the Victorians. About reciting Hopkins. About cutting a fresh nib on his pen and whispering -- don’t let this paper be too hard. And it wasn’t. He hoped... he hoped he was right.

His older self wasn’t _wrong_. But there was something about all of these strange old systems and hundreds of years of scholarship that at times he could feel in the air.

And yet for all of that he was still alone.

He found himself remembering that strange night -- he returned to it, over and over again. The magical fireworks, splitting open the sky. Two people he could feel himself becoming friends with -- and then. And then, as memories do, even after only a few months it had started to dissolve.

 ****\---

 ****His exams finished, and term rushed to an end. He had second year reading lists, essays to write over the vacation, and he had to move out of college in two days.

It seemed desperately unfair that he could be kicked out for a whole summer. Some people at college had opted for houses in Jericho and Cowley in second year, and were moving in that July, August. Remus was living in college accommodation, though. An old hotel on the Iffley Road. He hadn’t had the energy to get sorted in first term, and suddenly it was the only real option left.

He pressed his carnations between the pages of his oldest book. It was a big anthology of Victorian poetry that his dad had given him as a going-away gift. Gilt-edged pages, and marbled endpapers.

He prepared for one last excursion before he had to pack and go: searching the libraries for all of the different books he needed for vacation essays.

For the most part, the English Faculty Library was fine. He got a few books on Renaissance poetry there, made photocopies of some chapters from books he didn’t want to lug home, and felt -- almost cheated of a challenge. But there was more, more. Searching in the dustiest corners of the college library for a missing book on diction, going to the history library for a book on Medieval folklore.

By mid-afternoon on Friday, he found himself at the anthropology library. Not even the main anthropology library -- he’d heard there was a second one at the back of the Pitt Rivers museum (itself hidden away at the back of the Natural History museum). This wasn’t for academic reasons -- he’d gone through catalogues and library lists and he was sure that _this_ was the library with books about the history of magic tucked away inside it.

The door needed a key. Remus didn’t have a key, but he could see a librarian on the other side through the glass, so... rather than knock, he muttered alohomora and shuffled in as inconspicuously as he could.

The librarian looked like a wizard dressed poorly in muggle clothes. There was no other way to describe it. A canary-yellow woolly jumper (in June?), red braces, and some shabby pinstripe suit trousers that seemed to be slightly too long for him.

Remus had been in Oxford for long enough that he knew that this was not actually proof of magic. But.

Other than that, the library was kind of disappointing. Two small rooms, not even that many books. A couple of desks, but no scholars in the corners writing on parchment or poring over grimoires. The magical books mostly seemed to date from the 1950s, and they were not particularly interesting. Except -- pushed too far into the shelf, he found one, dark blue book. Victorian. He flicked through it carefully. Tissue paper over gaudy, coloured plates. The images didn’t move. Or -- he blinked, and wondered if he’d seen a flutter.

The book contained snatches of poetry and folklore. It wasn’t what Remus had been looking for -- but it was closer than anything he’d found anywhere else. The rest of Oxford’s magic seemed to be ephemeral. Or -- on the wind. In the blossoms blowing off the trees. In Hopkins, and his tiny, tiny college chapel. Too small for the choir to sing in.

And he’d found one book. He supposed there were always more libraries. Next year he could try the Bodleian -- no lending, but more books. And there were more catalogues he hadn’t seen, and there were always more librarians to bother.

So: one book. That was it for now.

He turned around, and almost had the life scared out of him. Because -- there, right in front of him. One of them leaning against the table, one of them pushing a hand through his unruly hair.

“Finally,” Sirius said. James grinned. “I started to think you’d never fucking find us.”

 ****\---

 ****“No,” Remus said, feeling bold on his third firewhiskey-and-juice cocktail. “No, that’s not actually an explanation for why you couldn’t come and find _me_.”

“Tradition,” Sirius said. He cracked another monkey nut, and dropped the shell messily on the table. James rolled his eyes and swept it into the pint glass they’d reserved for such detritus.

“It’s not the only place,” James said, apologetically. “Most students with magic who turn up here know where to go.”

“I suppose you did,” Remus said.

“Well,” James said, and looked at Sirius. “We applied to St Frideswide’s.”

Which... of course was not a college Remus had heard of. “Really,” he said.

James nodded, very seriously. “Mate,” he said. “They take fifteen people a year and they’re all total dickheads.”

“We’re in a cupboard at the back of St John’s,” Sirius said.

Which didn’t make much sense. “We’re in Jericho,” Remus said.

“No,” James said. “That’s where _we_ are. Where we’re... studying.”

Remus had not had that many drinks, but this was already too difficult for him to follow. “At the back of St John’s?” he said. “I thought you were at Trinity. Balliol, maybe.”

Sirius tugged him out of his seat. Remus felt a shiver run up his back as Sirius’s hand touched his arm, but he didn’t say anything. Sirius turned to look at the bar, but there was nobody there. “Come with us,” he said.

Remus thought they were going to take him outside -- maybe they’d want to trek back down St Giles and show him their cupboard. Which was not that appealing, although he probably wouldn’t say no. But instead they hopped over the bar, hissing and pulling him along. “Quickly,” Sirius said. “Last time we tried it here they almost caught us.”

Remus was too firewhiskey-hot and sticky-eyed to say anything for a second, and a second was all it took. They took one door, and then paused in front of another, and then Remus felt it.

A tug on his stomach -- this time it had nothing to do with Sirius Black.

Well, almost nothing. Because next, Sirius opened the door. “We’re here,” he said, and flopped through the door and onto a sofa that was... much like the common room Remus remembered.

The room was almost empty. There was an older wizard snoring in a massive armchair by the furthest door, a pile of large dice by his feet.

“It has a lot of different doors,” James explained. This time he immediately started making tea, but in a thermos he’d conjured up from somewhere. Remus briefly mourned the last mouthful of firewhiskey he’d abandoned in Jericho for this dank common room. “Around the time of the Statute of Secrecy, all of the scholar-wizards got together and cast a very powerful spell. It’s scattered throughout the city.”

“James is reading Modern and Ancient Magical History,” Sirius said. He didn’t sound impressed. James passed him the thermos anyway, and ruffled his hair. Sirius huffed and blew a loose curl out of his eye, and then leant right over to Remus. “Come on.”

James didn’t follow -- “I’d better get Nick to bed,” he said, sadly, eyeing the old wizard.

Sirius led Remus out of the far door, murmuring not much more than directions and words in Latin as they went. “Right,” he said, finally. It was dark. They were outside. “Here we go,” he said. “This is the Scholar’s garden.”  
  
Remus blinked. It was dark outside, and he could barely make anything out. He slowly pulled out his wand. He was almost certain that it wasn’t a trick. “ _Lumos_ ,” he said. Whispered. His heart went _thud_ against his breastbone.

An ancient tree. A bed of blue flowers, as blue as rain. A bush of roses. Carnations in lots of different colours. Radishes, and cabbages, and clover, and purple grass.

A spray of river where it shouldn’t have been. “They drew a lot of the city together,” Sirius said. Remus was afraid to take a step forward, for crushing something.

What else? A piece of the city wall. A bell. Not ringing; hanging from a branch. Waiting to ring.

“What are you doing this summer?” Sirius said. Remus glanced over at him. His hair was inky-black, but Sirius's eyes -- usually grey -- were reflecting the yellow of the Lumos light back at him.

“Shit,” Remus said. “My dad’s coming to collect me in a few hours. He’s driving a car?”

“Muggle?”

“No, just incorrigible.” Remus paused, and wondered if there was any good way to explain. “He thinks he can pass for a normal person.”

Sirius laughed. It was very dark, despite the light of Remus’s wand. There was almost no light from anywhere else but the sky. It was like the garden was in its own pocket of time, as well as its own space. “I was angry when I got here,” Sirius said. “My parents were both students at this place about thirty years ago and they had a great time and I wanted to hate it.”

“Why did you come?”

“I had nothing else to do,” Sirius said. He leaned over the tiny patch of river and held out his little finger. A small, luminous fish burst up and mouthed at it, then vanished back into the water again. “Why didn’t you go to Hogwarts?”

“How do you know I didn’t?” Remus said. “Maybe I was in another house. Hogwarts is big.”

Remus did visit Hogwarts for his exams and its bigness registered. Its bigness and its oldness and its wildness. He feels a tiny spark of that here. It’s different. But it’s something.

Sirius laughed again, and looked at Remus. He really looked at him. “Come on,” he said. “I would have noticed you.”

Remus shook his head and felt leaves rustle in the air. It was late. It would be time to leave Oxford in a few hours. He hadn’t packed. He hadn’t slept. He felt reluctant to go.

He thought -- no, this is not the time to leave. This is more important than sleep.

“Why do I only ever find you when it’s time to leave,” he said. “Where were you all term?”

“James said we had to wait for you,” Sirius said. He sounded apologetic. “He said it would be worth it.”

“Bet he thought I was a squib,” Remus said, sourly. He remembered the firework boys. The Phoenix Club, in their robes and fire.

Remus thought about the books of folklore and history and old, old charms in his satchel. He thought about the brittle plastic cases wrapped around them, and the way they would crinkle under his fingers. It was a sensation he could conjure up -- like James and the thermos, like Sirius and the garden.

And again, the sky felt like it was blooming, and the garden felt like it was flowering, and Remus was almost ready to choke on the heady summer air. Old, old air.

But he didn’t. Not quite.

“You should stay in Oxford for summer,” Sirius said. “I am.”

“It’s a bit late to make arrangements now,” Remus said. And it was.

But it wasn’t. Not too late; not at all.

\---

 ****A summer spent between two, three cities. Dad in Bristol, most days and nights in Oxford, the odd excursion to London. Sirius’s flat, Remus soon learned, was temperamental. “I haven’t got a handle on old Alphard’s wards,” he said, the second time he tried to go back there with Remus in tow.

Remus leant forward and pressed his hand to the door. It gave, but only very slightly. “Not today, dearie,” the door said, after a moment. “Try again tomorrow.”

“I hate my family,” Sirius said, scowling, as he reached for Remus’s wrist.

“I can apparate myself,” Remus said, because he _could_. “I passed my exam and everything.”

“Fine,” Sirius said, and disapparated with a crack.

It took Remus half a day of moping around Oxford and drinking milky tea in various cafes before Sirius came to find him, tail between his legs. Metaphorically speaking. “I just forget sometimes,” Sirius said. “It’s strange that I’ve only known you for a few months.”

Over that summer, Remus learned all about Sirius’s area of study. He was working on some kind of strange arcane dissertation about animagi.”Research as practice is most of it,” he said, with a grin. But he refused to show Remus anything about it.

Remus felt an itch when he spoke about this. He turned away from him, slightly, not on purpose. He wondered if his own secret was written on his skin. At the end of the summer, after Remus had returned from a full moon weekend with an extra suitcase full of old books and dusty clothes and bedsheets for the term ahead, the term that was due to start in two weeks -- Sirius came to find him.

Remus had various books and scraps of paper strewn around him in a loose semicircle. The shape helped him think. And Piers Plowman needed a lot of thought. He felt like to read it he needed to make a bargain with the earth, or the sky, or at least the college buildings. He wondered how many of Oxford’s strange little rituals had started as such bargains. He wondered how it was that his brain was at its best when it was half-thought, half-something else. Like instinct; like seeing through a thick cloud of mist, like slicing a hand through rain.

Sirius touched his arm, very gently. “I’ve worked it out, you know,” he said. For a second Remus hoped he was misunderstanding, but of course he wasn’t. “It makes sense. It all makes sense.”

“Nothing makes sense,” Remus muttered, not looking at him. “Have you worked out the conclusion to your thesis or something. Or have you worked out what the Pearl Poet was going on about.”

“You,” Sirius said. “It all makes sense. I’m so _clever_.”

Remus looked up at him on that note. He couldn’t not. His eyes were wet. “Come on,” Sirius said. “The full moons, that scar across the bridge of your nose that you think your glasses cover up.”

Remus, in fact, owned a mirror and knew that nothing could cover up that scar, but he didn’t really appreciate the mention. “Your dad’s a werewolf.”

Remus laughed, once, very quickly.

“Oh, no,” Sirius said, and gainfully sat down next to him, with minimal disruption to the semicircle. “I suppose it’s you.”

Remus looked up at the ceiling, which was just a ceiling. He was twenty in a few months. Fifteen years of this -- between two worlds. All of the knowing, and so little of the rest of it. The scraps of paper with lines from Piers Plowman written out, and each time he wrote the lines he had spoken them aloud. But no poetry of his own, and he had never --

“Dumbledore hoped that I could come,” Remus said. “He really did. And I wanted it too.”

The year that Remus was eleven; when he almost got the letter but didn’t. Not quite.

Sirius kiss the side of Remus’s head, nothing more. “You got Oxford, in the end.”

Second year hadn’t even started yet. “When are you going to show me this library?” Remus asked. Part deflection, part desperate wish.

“It doesn’t open for another week,” Sirius said. “It keeps its own hours, and it changes for no man. Or werewolf either.”

Remus was different; he knew that. But Sirius sat very close to him, anyway.

Two months later, midway through Michaelmas, Sirius turned into a black dog for the first time.

A year after that, in the midst of third year hysteria and postgrad applications, James turned into a stag. “I got bored,” he said, by way of explanation. “I read your essay a few times.”

What was there to say about the Library? It was everything the Bodleian Library was, and not. Bodley’s name written in gilt, above a doorway around one corner too many. The corner was in the Bodleian courtyard, or behind a college on St Giles, or -- always a corner more than you think.

A crow or two atop the catalogue drawers. A whispering tube that seemed to descend into the earth itself for passing down stack requests or, if you couldn’t find a record of the book you needed, Sirius swore that you could whisper to it, and it would provide what you needed.

“Or what it thinks you need,” Sirius said with a smirk. “My terrible cousin Andi swears my _worse_ cousin Bellatrix asked it for a book on the history of the Black Bloodline. She got given a guide to giving yourself a colonic irrigation, and a treatise about why purebloodedness is a myth.”

“I hate your family,” Remus said. “I haven’t met them but I just really think that.”

“You say the sweetest things,” Sirius said. He grinned, and checked his watch. “James will be back with Lily soon,” he said. Remus had met Lily once or twice, on short breaks from the league. She still had that deferred place; she was just having too much fun to take it up yet.

Remus flopped over onto his side and looked up at him, sidelong. “Why were you there?” he says. “That first night I met you.”

Sirius’s face shuttered, then started to open again, slowly. Remus had seen snatches of those boys around; fire-red robes, the blond heads curled over old books in the corner of the Crow’s Library. He hadn’t seen Sirius exchange more than a handful of words with any of them -- not even over breakfast in the strange, cobbled together dining hall.

Remus had not been back to his own college for much more than a tutorial or two for some time. “I have to say, I wasn’t expecting you to become such an occultist,” one of his tutors said to him, midway through Remus’s reading aloud of an essay on Shakespeare. “But it’s marvellous -- please go on.”

Sirius spoke slowly. “I knew something was afoot,” he said. “We’d heard of plans -- and when we started to see those bloody dragons snapping in the sky --”

Remus curled a finger into the hem of Sirius’s jumper. That’s my jumper, he thought. The bastard. He felt very bold. Sirius didn’t react either way.

“I don’t know,” Sirius sighed. “You hear about so many things in the Prophet. It’s getting worse all the time. Just wanted to make sure they weren’t luring any muggles in.”

“They got me instead,” Remus said. Homeschooled, werewolf muggle college, muggle course, stack of visionary poetry books by writers who had lived everywhere and nowhere.

“No they didn’t,” Sirius said. They didn’t know it yet, but this line would echo -- repeated again and again, over breakfast at Remus’s college, the morning before his final exam, in the college graveyard, in Sirius’s college graveyard, in the library, in the Botanic Gardens, on a may morning years later, when they’d decided to visit for no reason other than that they could --

“No,” Sirius said. “I’m afraid I got you instead.” Remus was shaking, and Sirius took his face between his hands. Remus thought -- I should feel graceful. I should feel romantic. But he wanted it so much that he almost didn’t know what to do. Sirius scratched a nail gently, very gently, just over the edge of Remus’s scar.

“Stop that,” Remus said. He thought he was about to die.

Sirius started to draw away --

“No, fuck, that’s not what I meant,” Remus said, and grabbed him back, and kissed him properly, like he had fucking wanted to ever since that first night, not quite drunk, suspended under dangerous fireworks and Oxford cold mist air. And the other nights since; sitting on piles of Middle English notes, eating pancakes in South Parks; searching for secret notes in the magical card catalogue, and feeding the crows berries and Christmas brandy.

The secret names scratched into library benches, wooden panelling. The strange handwritten annotations in manuscripts that Remus couldn’t begin to make heads or tails of. The medieval herbal poetry, tucked away, that makes Remus’s spine tingle every time he reads it --

The whole little back room stuffed full of ecstatic poetry, each poem stuffed full of old spells, calling to something beyond.

And all of it, all of it is important. But also, the nights that Sirius just... walked Remus back to his bed, along New College Lane, which became Queen’s Lane when it twisted round one too many times.

The moment in his first term when Remus thought, really thought. Did Oscar Wilde really walk here? And Shelley, too?

“I understand,” Sirius said, almost into Remus’s mouth. And Remus didn’t, not really. But he had time. He had time for all of it. The air was full with the stillness of a bell that hasn’t yet started to ring. And there was pie for dinner, and Quidditch to play in a back field Sirius knew, hidden away behind the river.

“I really wanted to kiss you. All of those times,” Remus said, not explaining which ones.

“I thought so,” Sirius said, and laughed because what he meant was: I hoped.

And what else? What else was there to say?

All of it.

And the rivers, and the canals, and the mud, and more fireworks, and more fights and books and breakfasts, and more of everything to come.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Prompt:** #76 - picture: open case, painted blue, containing leather gloves, a leather billfold, and vintage photographs  
> 


End file.
